Bjarni snarled at him. His lip and eye were swollen and when he moved, his muscles ached. He pushed Jon and Andres away from him and bent over the bucket of water.
“We tried to help you,” Jon said. “Why are you angry with us?
“Get out of here,” Bjarni said. It hurt to talk. He dipped his hands into the cold water.
“You sound like Papa,” Andres said. He and Jon left the booth.
Bjarni washed his face and his filthy hands, scabbed with dirt and blood. Ulf sat watching him in silence. Bjarni could not look at him; the memory of his humiliation burned in him. There was no one else in the booth. He was ashamed to go out, ashamed to see the men who had beaten him, and he prolonged the washing. The door at the other end of the booth opened.
“Cover yourselves,” a woman called.
Bjarni straightened; Ulf slid off the bench to his feet. “Gudrun,” he called.
Sigurd’s blond daughter came down the booth toward them, a basket under her arm. She passed through the slice of daylight under the window and the light shone over her wheaten hair and creamy skin.
“I have brought you some food,” she said, and set the basket down.
“Stay,” Ulf said. He caught hold of her hand.
“I must go,” she said.
But she sat down willingly enough beside Ulf on the bench. She smiled at Bjarni and said, “You are quite a fighting man. My father is much pleased with you.”
Bjarni wiped his face on a towel. Ulf was holding the girl’s hand on his knee and looking into her face, and she put her hand on his chest and pushed him.
“No, go away, you are very familiar. I’m not even supposed to come in here.” She pushed him again, smiling at him.
“Just a little while,” Ulf said. He took cheese and meat from the basket. “Share this with us.”
“I am going,” Bjarni said. He went down the sleeping booth toward the door. The roofbeams crossed just over his head, trailing cobwebs, and he beat them down with his hands. At the door he glanced back to see Ulf and Gudrun sitting together in the half-dark, laughing. Ulf fed her a piece of a bun.
“I must go,” she said, and giggled, and made no attempt to rise. Bjarni went out of the booth.
Swan
was moored in among the longships. Her broad beam and chopped prow made her loutish by comparison. Bjarni collected some of his crew and they refitted her, mending rigging and filling her watercasks. No one said anything about the fight. Carefully no one looked at Bjarni’s bruises. His hands bothered him. In the stern he came on the oar with the runes on it. He touched the rune called the Hammer, where it occurred in several words, and swore that he would repay Sigurd. After that his mood lightened. He went back to the shore.
Kristjan was standing there on the beach. When Bjarni pulled the ship’s boat up onto the cobbles Hiyke’s son called to him.
“Lord Sigurd wants to see you in the hall.”
Bjarni made the boat’s painter fast to a stump. “Why were you talking to him?”
Kristjan sidled away down the beach. “He asked me a few questions.” He turned his back to Bjarni and went off.
Bjarni found Sigurd in the hall, eating, with a servant behind him to hold his napkin. When Bjarni came into the hall Sigurd put down the meat bone in his hands. He looked Bjarni over well before he spoke. Bjarni was willing to wait for his revenge; he could be civil now, and he let Sigurd look.
“I understand you are stocking your ship,” the older man said. “Have we frightened you away?”
“I don’t mind a little fighting,” Bjarni said. He stood across the table from Sigurd. “I don’t like that you questioned my stepbrother.”
Sigurd picked the bone from the table and set his teeth to it again. “He is not a talkative child.”
“We are all together, we Icelanders,” Bjarni said. “You talk to us all when you talk to me.”
“Hoskuld hates you. Now, why would he send me a son he hates? It sounds to me as if he wants you done away with.”
“I don’t know about that,” Bjarni said. “Neither does Kristjan.”
Sigurd snapped his fingers and the servant brought him the napkin so that the lord could wipe his greasy beard. He drank from his gold cup. Voices sounded at the far end of the hall. Footsteps ground on the floor. Sigurd struck the table with his palm.
“You are an innocent,” he said to Bjarni. “No one lives the way you want to live. In this world, everyone has his master; everyone has his underlings. I can protect you from your father. Serve me, fight for me, obey me, and I will make you rich. But you must take Christ.”
“My god is Asa-Thor,” Bjarni said.
“Your stepbrother says that all save you are Christian.”
“All save me and Ulf. His mother turned to the white altars when he was weaned. What about this Bishop you are warring with? Is he not a Christian? I thought you loved one another, you Christians.”
“The Bishop is a false priest who claims lands where I alone am lord,” Sigurd said. “But you do not see the advantages in taking Christ. Your god-goat gives you nothing. I need only repent at the proper moment, and Christ will give me life eternal.”
“Do you have to die first? Then I don’t see that he gives you very much.”
Sigurd thrust his empty cup at the servant, who took it at a run down the table. The lord thrust his grey head forward toward Bjarni. The shredded gold flashed on his sleeves and collar. When he spoke he pushed each word at Bjarni with a bobbing of his head.
“Your goat-god, your dirty-handed farmer-god, did he save you from the beating last night? Can he save you from death?”
“Every man comes to die,” Bjarni said. “It is the price of life. There is no choice in it, save to meet it well.”
“That is the weakness in the old way, do you not see? If there is no choice, a man is worthless, the slave of Fate. Christ has freed us from that.”
“Free. You have no claim on that word. You Christians are ever telling folk how to act.”
“A man can sin,” Sigurd said.
“You leave me unconvinced.”
“Because you will not bend your mind,” Sigurd said. He tossed the picked bone under the table. “We shall argue again—I enjoy this. In time you will agree. Now take leave of me, I must talk to these other men.”
He rose from the High Seat and walked off along the table, his hand stretched out to a small troop of newcomers. Bjarni turned slowly away from the table.
Sigurd’s men were coming in and out of the hall. Some stood idly talking by the door, and some were drinking. Bjarni had seen no one here do any work, except the servants. The belts of the men were stuffed with knives and swords and hatchets. On their arms they wore heavy bracelets of gold, and there were gold rings in their ears and on their fingers. Bjarni was a misfit here, poorer than the servants. His gaze caught on a man sitting on the bench by the fire.
It was Lyr, the burly man with the feathers in his beard, who had started the fight. Bjarni went around the hearth to him.
“Get up,” he said.
The feathered man raised his startled face. He looked to right and left; there was room on the bench.
“Get up,” Bjarni said again.
Reluctantly the burly man stood. He watched uncertainly as Bjarni took his place on the bench. After a moment he slunk away down the hall.
* * *
TWO MORE LONGSHIPS rowed into the cove between then and nightfall. In the crowded anchorage, Bjarni took the ship’s small boat again and again around
Swan,
directing his brothers inside the ship to move the ballast here and there, so that
Swan
rode better in the water.
“When shall we sail?” Andres said.
He sat in the stern of the boat; Bjarni and Jon were rowing back to the beach.
“Do you have someplace to go?” Bjarni asked.
“Anywhere but here,” Andres said, intensely. “This is a wicked place.”
“He’s right,” Jon said, behind Bjarni at the bow oars. “Let’s go back to Iceland. These people are sinners.”
Bjarni trailed his oars to turn the boat. The little waves lifted her sideways up onto the gravelly beach. “I have been beaten worse in Iceland. Hop out.”
His half brothers sprang out of the boat, and he waited for another wave to carry him higher on the shore and got out onto the land. They dragged the boat out of the surf. Jon walked on his left, Andres on his right, and they flung arguments at him, none convincing. They were both a head shorter than he was. Their fair faces, broad and stub-nosed, reminded him of Hoskuld. He let them argue and said nothing.
They went into the little booth where
Swan’s
crew slept. The men from the two new longships were staying there as well and the place was crowded. Ulf sat on the wooden bench where he slept; he smiled, and in his hands held a piece of fine linen.
“What is that?” Jon said.
Ulf held it out to him. “Smell of it.”
Bjarni took a bucket out the door and filled it from the rainbarrel under the eave. When he came in again, Jon was holding the linen at arm’s length. It was a piece of a woman’s underclothing, the top piece. Jon threw it down.
“You will get us all in trouble,” Andres hissed, and glanced around them at the other men scattered through the dark room.
Bjarni set the bucket on the bench, stripped off his shirt, and washed himself. Ulf was grinning. He took the linen in his hands and sniffed it and laid it against his cheek.
“I notice there’s only one piece,” Bjarni said. He splashed cold water on his arms.
“If she lets me in the loft,” Ulf said, “she’ll let me into the kitchen.”
Bjarni stooped over the bucket and scooped water onto his face. He scrubbed himself and dried himself and combed his hair and his beard. He was of a mind to stay here until he heard more about the Bishop and the war; but Ulf and Gudrun were adding to the risks of that. He took a clean shirt out of his sea-chest and put it on.
“I am going to the hall,” he said. “Are you coming?”
Jon and Andres rounded on him, their eyes wide, and spoke at once. “You are mad. Do you like being beaten?” Andres said, “They are all sinners.”
Bjarni shrugged. He left the sleeping booth. The sun had set. Streaks of red and orange lay across the sky; in the east, the night had come. A cold wind touched his cheek. The boardwalk resounded under the feet of the streams of men on their way to the hall. The little waves of the cove lapped on the shore. The water was dark as death. The longships slapped and creaked at their moorings. His eyes fastened on a high coiled prow, black against the ruddy sky. The beauty stirred his heart. All his life he had heard of such ships, of the glory of the men who sailed them. Maybe in those earlier days the men had been different. He saw nothing glorious in Sigurd’s men, falling as soon as he hit them so that another could take the fight. He went up the boardwalk toward the crowded hall.
He ate; he drank beer; he found someone to play chess with him. While he was studying a difficult position Sigurd called him to the High Seat.
“Tell your brother to leave off courting my daughter,” Sigurd said.
The table’s breadth was between them, littered with food and cups. Bjarni set his hand on it. He said, “I don’t see that she objects.”
“I object,” Sigurd said. He waggled his finger at Bjarni. “You do something about it. Then come back. I have some work for you and your ship.”
Bjarni went down the hall. The door was open and he stepped past the men coming through it, out to the evening air. A mist was rising out of the damp grass. Off to his left, halfway down the boardwalk to the beach, was the Christian temple, and Ulf and Gudrun were sitting on the porch together. Bjarni went down to them.
“Come over here a moment,” he said to Ulf.
They went a few yards down the boardwalk. Bjarni said, “Her father just spoke to me about you and this girl.”
“Oh? Is he talking about a dowry?”
“No, he wants me to tell you to leave her alone.”
Ulf grunted. He put his hands on his hips. “Damn him. No. Tell him I have not trifled with her. Tell him—” His face worked. “Tell him I will marry her.”
“He also has some work for
Swan
. After I have told you to leave his daughter alone.” Bjarni turned his eyes down the dark slope. The mist blurred the shapes of the longships on the water.
“He is ready to attack the Bishop,” Ulf said. “Maybe he will use us as a scout.” He glanced to either side. A file of men trampled past them, dividing to go by them on the plank walk. Under his breath, Ulf said, “I can see Gudrun in secret.”
“I am not telling you to leave her,” Bjarni said. “I do not take his orders. Go tell our crew to load their chests into the ship.”
Ulf grinned at him. “You are a very stubborn man.”
“We will be in some trouble before long,” Bjarni said. He went back to the hall.
After an hour or so had passed Sigurd called to him again. He went up before the High Seat.
“Is your ship ready to sail?” Sigurd said. “You will take one of my pilots here with you and sail south with a message for the Bishop.”
“You are going too fast,” Bjarni said. “We have not agreed yet on the terms of our partnership.”